Every SaaS founder I talk to has roughly the same mental model. They picture the feature, the product they want to build, the screens, the workflow. Then they get a quote and it's three times what they expected and they assume someone is gouging them.
Almost always, nobody is gouging. The founder is just seeing the visible 20% of the iceberg. Here's the other 80%.
Real AUD ranges
- MVP: $12k–$24k. Auth, billing, one core feature, ready for beta. Eight to ten weeks. Single tenant model, Stripe Billing, email auth. Real software, but with the absolute minimum boring infrastructure.
- Production: $32k–$80k. Multi-tenant SaaS ready for real customers and revenue. SSO ready, admin tools, audit logs. Twelve to sixteen weeks. The bulk of funded SaaS projects land here.
- Enterprise-ready: $80k–$300k+. SOC 2 prep, custom contracts, on-prem option, dedicated team. Multi-quarter engagement. Usually triggered by a specific enterprise customer in your pipeline.
What "the boring 80%" actually is
If you peel back any SaaS, you'll find that the work behind the visible product is dominated by the same dozen concerns:
- Auth: signup, login, password reset, magic link, SSO, MFA
- Multi-tenancy: row-level security or schema-per-tenant, tenant switching, data isolation tests
- Billing: Stripe integration, subscriptions, proration, dunning, invoicing, tax (Australian GST)
- Roles and permissions: RBAC, owner/admin/member, invitations, removals
- Admin tools: customer impersonation, support ticket lookup, manual data fixes
- Onboarding: empty states, sample data, getting-to-value flow
- Audit logs: who did what, when, from where
- Email: transactional templates, deliverability, bounce handling
- Analytics: cohort analysis, MRR, churn signals
- Status page and incident comms
Each of those is one to four weeks of work. None of them are visible to your customers. They just expect them to exist. Skip them and you'll be retrofitting them at twice the cost six months later.
Where founders waste money
The single most common waste in SaaS budgets: building features the marketing site implies you have, instead of features your beta users are asking for. I've watched founders spend $15k on a "team workspace" feature in their MVP because the landing page promised collaboration. Zero of their first 50 customers used it.
Build the boring 80% and the smallest possible 20%. Ship. Let users tell you what the next 20% is.
Second most common waste: premature optimisation. Multi-region deployment, micro-services architecture, custom auth, all of it can wait. You can rewrite when you have $1m ARR. You can't rewrite when you have $0.
What the build cost doesn't include
The big surprises in year one:
- Stripe + Stripe Tax fees: 2.9% + 30c, plus 0.5% for Tax. If you're at $200k ARR, that's around $7k/year in fees alone.
- Hosting and infrastructure: $200–$2,000/month depending on stack and scale.
- Email service: $30–$300/month. Resend, Postmark, or SendGrid. Don't try to send transactional email from your own server.
- Error monitoring: $30–$200/month. Sentry or similar. Non-negotiable.
- Customer support tooling: $0–$300/month. Intercom or alternative.
- Compliance work for enterprise: $20k–$80k for SOC 2 prep, separate from the build.
- Ongoing development: 30–50% of build cost per year. SaaS isn't done at launch. It's done when you stop selling it.
How to scope a SaaS without overpaying
The cleanest pattern I've seen for funded teams: a two-week paid foundation sprint that delivers all of the boring 80%, auth, tenancy, billing, admin, and nothing else. Then iterative feature build on top. This separates the unavoidable infrastructure cost from the feature scope, and it gives you a clean fixed price on the part that won't change.
For pre-seed founders, the cleanest pattern is the opposite: build only the absolute MVP, host on a single tier, defer multi-tenancy until you have ten paying customers. You'll waste some code rewriting later, but you'll waste less than building production infrastructure for a product nobody buys.
The bottom line
An Australian SaaS MVP costs $12k–$24k. A production-ready B2B SaaS costs $32k–$80k. Anything outside that range is either an enterprise build or someone is selling you infrastructure you don't need yet.
If you want three quotes from Australian developers who've shipped SaaS before, that's exactly what we do. Free, three real prices, in 24 hours.